MarysLibrary

Bootlegger's Daughter by Margaret Maron

When Bootlegger's Daughter was published in 1992 it won Dilys, Macavity, Anthony, and Edgar awards. That's an impressive record, so I borrowed the book from the library. I loved it, partly because it takes place in the area of North Carolina where I lived for some years and the author, who lives there also, has the local color perfect. Eating Carolina barbecue (with vinegar) and watching a Durham Bull's game on a warm summer evening, admiring the azaleas and dogwoods, big summer picnics with guests parking in the fields, even the chiggers and midges.

Then I forgot about the book for 20 years until something brought it to my attention the other day and I borrowed it from the library again. And it's even better the second time around. Besides all that local color there is some excellent characterization, especially that of the main character, Deborah Knott, an attorney in a small North Carolina town who is running for district judge.

Eighteen years previously a local woman was murdered and the police were never able to figure out who did it. The cold case was reopened 10 years later with no better results. Now the daughter of the dead woman asks Deborah to find out what she can about the murder.

Deborah knows everybody in town and her family and theirs go back many generations so she knows whom to talk to. As she begins to ask around she discovers some clues that were held back by the police and that might help track down the murderer. But this sleuthing is doing nothing to enhance her chances of winning the judgeship.

The Inventor and the Tycoon by Edward Ball

There's been a lot of buzz about the new book, The Inventor and the Tycoon by Edward Ball. It tells the story of Leland Stanford's organizing and building of the Central Pacific Railroad. The Union Pacific was built westward from Missouri to meet the Central Pacific being built eastward over and through the Sierra Nevada from Sacramento. It also tells the story of Ted Muggeridge (who changed his name numerous times and ended up as Eadweard Muybridge), the man who figured out how to take multiple photographs of a moving animal or person and then play these back so as to produce "moving pictures." It was for Leland Stanford that Muybridge first photographed a running horse. Stanford had a theory that when galloping a horse would at times have all four feet off the ground. Muybridge was able to prove that it is true.

The book should be mesmerizing. These are complicated and inspiring stories and we should find ourselves fascinated by the story of four shopkeepers on K Street in Sacramento who got together to create the transcontinental railroad: Leland Stanford, Charles Crocker, Collis Huntington, and Mark Hopkins. And the story of Muybridge's development of a reliable way to take multiple pictures in sequence is intriguing.

But the author manages somehow to deaden these stories. The book is at least twice the length it needs to be, and the author's mentions of himself and his occasional sarcasm are disconcerting. The book is very repetitious, although this is not the usual inadvertant repetition but rather intentional, a stylistic quirk.

There is much to admire and to criticize in the lives of the two main characters. We are encouraged to admire and respect Muybridge despite his having murdered a man. We are encouraged to despise Stanford, apparently only because he made a lot of money. Even his building of Stanford University, to which he left at his death the equivalent of $150,000,000 in today's dollars, is dismissed as an egotistical act complicated by the author's implication that Stanford and his wife mourned to an unnecessary degree when their son, for whom the university is named, died.

The book is poorly organized. It reminded me of roofing shingles, each one going back and covering part of the previous one. The stories overlap, with unnecessary retelling. Even the story of Muybridge's discovery that his wife was having an affair and that her son was not his child manages to move so slowly that by the time the man arrives in Calistoga, California, and shoots his wife's lover the reader is relieved that it's over.

I feel quite sure this book will be greatly admired and the reviews will be positive. But borrow it from the library and see if you agree with me about its disorganization and density before you pay $30 for it.

The Trial: More Links of the Daisy Chain by Charlotte M Yonge

Eight years after the publication of her best-seller, The Daisy Chain, Charlotte M Yonge continued the story of the May family in The Trial in 1864. Although not quite up to the quality of the original novel, in some ways The Trial will appeal more to the modern reader.

When an epidemic of scarlet fever or some other now rare childhood disease breaks out Dr May and others work around the clock to help the afflicted, including the Ward family. The two sons and three daughters come through but their parents die. Eldest son, Henry, is a doctor and Dr May offers to help him build a practice while Ethel May volunteers to take the second son, Leonard, who is the hero of the novel, on a trip to the shore where it is hoped that he and Ethel's brother will recover.

They do recover and Ethel becomes close to the teen-aged Leonard. However, the prickly Henry resents the help and friendship of the May family and gets into a serious row with Leonard, who picks up and goes to work as a clerk for a relative. When the old man is murdered, Leonard is arrested, and it is his trial that gives us the title. He is found guilty but Dr May is able to have his sentence reduced from hanging to life in prison.

Henry, embarrassed and humiliated, changes the family name and takes the girls to America. Having no common sense, Henry takes his sister's small inheritance and invests it in what turns out to be a fever-ridden town in the wilderness. Then he goes off to join the Union army's medical corps.

The plot is worked very carefully. In addition to Leonard's trial, other characters face trials of their own as they struggle to do what is right and to overcome hardships. The religion and didacticism is less prominent in this sequel and the characters of the Ward family are well-developed.

Charlotte Yonge is going through a bit of a rediscovery, with this book, The Daisy Chain, The Heir of Redclyffe, The Clever Woman of the Family, and The Pillars of the House showing up on reading lists and in blogs. It takes a little work to overlook the Oxford movement saturation of some of the books, but Yonge's stories, characters, and portrayal of everyday life in a middle-class provincial family is worth it.

Ivy: The Life of I Compton-Burnett by Hilary Spurling

Ivy Compton-Burnett's novels have interested me for some time. They are unique - almost no description, no narrative, no stage directions. They consist almost entirely of dialog. It's up to the reader to figure out who is in the room, who has left, who has arrived, and anything else one might want to know about the scene one is reading and the people in it. Age, relationship to other characters, hopes, fears - all of it must be dug out by the reader.

They are full of quips. Cynical, satirical, malevolent, sometimes inexplicable. And as you read more than one or two of these slim novels you find certain typical characters in most of them: the tyrant who makes the lives of people around her (or him) miserable; the quiet, observant, non-interfering character; the victim of the tyrant; the refreshingly honest and outspoken woman, usually one of a pair of such women; the brother and sister who are devoted to one another and whose relationship is destined to crack apart. "A calm front, inner tumult, and a staggering lack of imagination on the part of those who accept the one without discerning the other beneath it, are constant themes through the work of I Compton-Burnett."

All of this conveyed by nearly pure dialog.

So when I happened on an inexpensive used copy of a 1974 biography of IC-B by Hilary Spurling I bought it. However, the book is 620 pages long and one doesn't embark on that sort of thing without packing a lunch and having one's mail held. I expected the biography to be tough to digest, considering those dialog drenched novels.

I was wrong. The biography is very readable, very interesting, in fact, fascinating, mesmerizing.

Someone suggested to IC-B that he should write a biography of her or that she should write her memoirs. Oh, no, said Ivy, my life has been so uneventful. There would be nothing to write about.

This from a woman who in her childhood was exceptionally close to her brothers, having no other friends at all. One of them died young of pneumonia. The other married, leaving Ivy feeling bereft. And then he died on the Somme. Two of her sisters died in a suicide pact. And her mother was by all accounts a raving tyrant who virtually ruined the lives of her children. And when the mother died, Ivy found herself evolving into a tyrant herself.

For most of her life, IC-B shared an apartment with Margaret Jourdain, a furniture expert with many friends and followers. Margaret was by all accounts the dominant character and Ivy shrank into the background and muttered about the cost of mutton and the difficulty of getting good help. This self-effacement went on until Margaret died, at which point Ivy gathered literary friends about her and became a public figure, her novels by then having become popular, if only among a small group of highbrow readers.

Never much like everybody else, she became increasingly eccentric in her old age. A friend "was most impertinent about my wine, said Ivy,dropping lumps of ice into her glass of sweet Graves overheated in front of the electric fire: I am not very wine-wise, you know."

There are many accounts of the consternation Ivy caused by hitching up her long dress far above her knee and splaying her legs as she sat down to table . . . or - most disconcerting of all to nervous subjects - rummaging around under her capacious skirts in a slow, methodical search for the handkerchief tucked in her knickers. . . . She shared with Margaret a trick of ducking her head to look down the front of her bodice, 'as though she had detected something surprising there, and not altogether pleasant.' . . .  For all her insistence on propriety and manners, Ivy's conventionality was never more than skin deep. 'In her life as in her novels,' wrote [a friend], 'she used the framework of her Victorian-Edwardian background as a convenience to be discarded when it suited her'.

The story of her life, youth and family, education at Holloway College, self-sacrifice and self-effacement as demanded by her mother, and finally escape to London and a friendship with Margaret Jourdain that suited them both and enabled both to play the role they designed for themselves.

So I was engrossed in this biography and found it swift going. However, unless you are interested in IC-B's novels you might not find the book as entrancing as I did. If you are reading and enjoying her novels, this book is indispensable.

Interpreting Sargent by Elizabeth Prettejohn

John Singer Sargent's portraits have always appealed to me although I had not thought much about them, what their appeal was, into what "school" Sargent could be classified, whether he is still highly regarded by the art world today.

Elizabeth Prettejohn's Interpreting Sargent, which was published in conjunction with the Sargent exhibit at the National Gallery in 2000, discusses all this and more, providing us with a fairly objective modern look at a painter whose reputation had apparently been declining for decades before this show. I saw that retrospective and I'm not sure why I didn't pick up this book as it's reasonable in price and filled with insightful observations about Sargent's French, English, and American portraits and how they differ.

When he was in his prime, around 1900, to be painted by Sargent was an expensive proposition. A single, full-length portrait cost more than the equivalent of $100,000 today. It was trendy at that time to have paintings of three sisters or a mother and two children and these of course would cost rather more. Asher Wertheimer, whose portrait Singer painted in 1898, was so pleased with that work that he commissioned 10 or 11 more paintings from Singer. Wertheimer gave all of them to the nation (England) when he died.

Pettejohn tells us almost all of them have been in storage all these years. Singer's reputation was savaged by art critics after his death and although the National Gallery did exhibit the portraits together for a short time, they then disappeared for many decades. I find that unfortunate as the Wertheimer portrait and the one of his daughters, Ena and Betty are among my favorites and seem to me to exhibit the "psychological depth" Sargent was criticized as lacking.

(The painting of Wertheimer is from this site.)

The Daisy Chain by Charlotte M Yonge

In its day, The Daisy Chain was extremely popular. Published in 1856 and very much in the style of the day, Charlotte M Yonge's novel reinforced all of the mores of mid-Victorian England. Religion underpins the lives of the characters, along with respect for parents and other authority figures, women and girls dedicated to making life easier and more rewarding for boys and men, self-effacement, modesty, humility, forgiveness, self-sacrifice, stifling of one's yearnings, and absolute honesty.

The story begins with the death in a carriage accident of the mother of the May family, and the permanent crippling of the eldest daughter, Margaret. Dr May is left with 11 children to raise on his own, relying very heavily on his elder daughters to guide the younger ones as their mother would have done.

The plot is thready, with episodes concerning crises in the lives of the May children arising and being dealt with in serial fashion. Bullying at school, over-reaching for a scholarship, the surprising choice of husband for one of the girls, the founding of a school for the children of brickmakers, and eventually a church in their neighborhood, all are examined and analyzed and the most honest, self-effacing, and generous solution discovered. Then the story moves on.

The novel's primary character, the child whose development we are most interested in, is Ethelred May, in her early teens when he mother dies, and a keen scholar, actually tutoring her brothers who are in school while she teaches herself at home. She is clearly more intelligent and suited for scholarship than they are and she loves the Latin and Greek she is immersed in.

Scholarship is Ethel's gift and the reader's heart breaks as she eventually convinces herself that she must sacrifice it to become a real woman, focused on helping the others in her family and denying herself that which she is best at and loves most. This was vastly appealing to the Victorian reader, and influenced many other novels of the time. The modern reader's reaction ranges from heartbreak to fury as Ethel turns from her books and instead applies her intelligence and hard work to teaching Sunday school, running the household, and giving wise advice to her siblings.

The author, Charlotte M Yonge, never married, and she devoted herself and the proceeds from her many and popular novels to just the undertakings she praises in the novel: bringing education and religion to the working classes, missionaries, and devotion to the Church of England and especially the Oxford Movement. (John Keble was a neighbor and friend.)

Yonge donated large amounts of money for the missionary movement in the South Seas, and she sends some of her characters in The Daisy Chain as missionaries to New Zealand and Melanesia. The boys, influenced by Ethel and their eldest brother, Richard, undertake careers that they are not entirely convinced will be satisfying to them in order to do what their religion and family loyalty expects of them.

The Daisy Chain has a sequel, The Trial, published in 1864, which I discovered after working my way through the 661 pages of the novel. Its 416 pages bring the story of the May family to more than 1,000 pages, all of which we are told were eagerly read and re-read by Yonge's admirers, which included George Eliot, Lewis Carroll, Christina Rosetti, Tennyson, and Trollope.

Winter at Our House

Felicity & Barbara Pym by Harrison Solow

Barbara Pym is one of those authors whose readers fall into either the category "I love her!" or "What's the fuss?" Harrison Solow loves her, which is obvious from her delightful fictitious non-fiction book, Felicity & Barbara Pym, published in 2010. It's a clever idea: a young college student has to write an essay about Barbara Pym's novels and an experienced teacher guides her as she approaches this entirely new subject. The foreward to the book is by Hazel Holt, who calls it original, controversial, academic, readable, serious, light-hearted, sensible, and charming.

Felicity is a fictional student at a fictional New England Ivy ("with its strangely appropriate connotations of creeping tendrils, tenacity, and poison") who is writing to the fictional Mallory Cooper, who is working in Hollywood but for a semester is tutor to Felicity whose literature professor is on sick leave. Mallory bears a striking resemblance to Harrison Solow. The tutor begins by recommending that Felicity learn what she can about the English, who are a more complex people than other anglophones realize.

The tutor begins with a recommended reading list to give Felicity a feeling for the English and their world:

• Lark Rise to Candleford by Flora Thompson
• English Eccentrics by Edith Sitwell
• The English by J B Priestly
• Victoria's Heyday by J B Priestly
• Anything by Somerset Maugham, Iris Murdock, Margaret Drabble, A S Byatt
• Some of the Miss Read books
• The Damerosehay Trilogy by Elizabeth Goudge
• Novels by D E Stevenson
• Cider with Rosie by Laurie Lee
• Poets of whom Miss Pym's characters are fond: Coventry Patmore, Matthew Arnold, Tennyson, Pope, Milton, Goldsmith, Keats, Gray, Marvell, Donne, Rossetti
• The Story of English by Robert McCrum, William Cran, and Robert MacNeil

This is not the typical college reading list but the tutor believes Felicity will learn more from these books than from sociological or historical studies.They are, she says,

... solid reflections of the same culture and era as ... Barbara Pym. I think you will find great (and many) similarities of tone, attitude, cultural and moral values, habits, customs, foods, assumptions, rituals, language, class, education, and society between these illuminating tales and those works that are considered literature by people who think they know about such things -- as well as by the people who do.

More books to provide background are those written for children by Noel Streatfield, A A Milne, E Nesbit, C S Lewis, and P L Travers. Also worthwhile to set the scene is Robert Louis Stevenson's xenophobic children's verse,"which represents an attitude of semi-sweet smugness that you will find over and over in English literature."

I want you to feel the vocabulary and the syntax and the concerns and the themes -- the flavour and the manners and the foods and the tools of Barbara Pym's world.

Although she does not want Felicity to begin there, she does send her to the critics that many of us read when we were studing English literature (and that I still own in browning and slightly foxed paperbacks.)

• E M Forster, Aspects of the Novel
• Ian Watt
• Virginia Woolf
• I A Richards
• William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity
• F R Leavis
• Northrop Fry
• The Pelican Guide to English Literature (in 7 volumes)

The girl is assigned Barbara Pym's novels as the subject for a major essay and as she begins reading the first, Some Tame Gazelle, she finds herself immediately floundering. "Nothing happens," she complains. The men are silly and the women are mousy. The characters are all alike. What's with the dowdy clothes? And how can anybody consume as much tea as the people in these novels?

All valid complaints coming from a very young, not-widely-read, student whose first questions to her tutor are: Why should I read Barbara Pym? and Why read literature at all? Solow does a fine job of answering.

She points out that Barbara Pym's novels are written by a woman who is steeped in the habits of her age and class. She was born in 1913 and was upper middle class and very well educated (Oxford.) Her books are far from obvious and they emphasize the importance of class in that era. Says Solow: "... there are a number of seemingly irrelevant and random factors on which the delicate structure of class is built, the least of which is income, and the greatest of which may be, ... a cup of tea."

She recommends that Felicity "... investigate every reference to every author, book, poem, or source quoted in Barbara Pym's work. You will not understand her characters, nor will you succeed in your English Literature studies unless you do." This is something my online otherlit group has discovered as we make our way through Pym's oeuvre.

She also recommends that Felicity learn all there is to know about tea and be prepared to take a test on afternoon tea, high tea, meat tea, lunch, dinner, supper, China tea, Ceylon tea, and whether the milk is put into the cup before or after the tea itself.

Her explanation of the world Pym's women come from, their experiences and their expectations is excellent. These are women who spent the most important years of their youth during the war; they are used to sacrifice and keeping a stiff upper lip in the face of nightly bombardment. They understand the class significance of a rayon sweater, a brightly colored dress, or baggy tweeds. They have grown up reading Enid Blyton and adopted her values: self-deprecation, doing one's bit, never drawing attention to oneself.

The tutor in the book has taught a class comparing Barbara Pym and Anita Brookner and she gives us the syllabus. ("You must, you must, must read Anita Brookner, quite probably the best and certainly one of the three best English (fiction and nonfiction) writers in England today.") Pym was the mistress of the "in group" and Brookner of the "out group." I would dearly love to take that class if it existed.

MarysLibrary is 7 Years Old!

Today is the anniversary of my blog, which is seven years old today. That's a long time to be posting every day (more or less - there have been stretches when I didn't post much.) Its purpose at first was to alert my friends to books I thought they might like. But over the years it has become a place for me to express myself, to talk about what I think of various books. The process of writing comments helps me to think more clearly about what I've been reading.

A couple of years ago there was an ongoing public conversation about the worth of blogs.The "professionals" who review books for newspapers and magazines were a bit put out at all these "amateurs" horning in on their territory. But blogs serve a different purpose than the New York Times Book Review or Bookmarks magazine. A more personal purpose.

If you are like me you have a few favorite blogs that you go to for amusement and news about the life of the blogger as well as book recommendations. There are some blogs that serve a sort of negative purpose. I don't like the sort of books the blogger likes so her reviews give me a clue not to bother with those books. There is one blogger, Thomas at MyPorch, whose taste is almost exactly parallel to mine and I find a lot of new (really old, but new to me) titles there. Book blogs have deeply enhanced my reading.

Seven years!

Comfort Reading

Having had a couple of visits to the hospital of late I've been in sore need of comfort reading. I fell back on Winnie the Pooh and Hazel Holt's Mrs Malory mysteries, which were perfect for what I needed. (I took a Sarah Caudwell mystery with me and literally couldn't read it.)

My online friend, Bobby Lee Eason, recently addressed comfort reading in a Trollope group post and gave us a link to India Knight's Posterous where she recently compiled a wonderful list. I know it's wonderful although I haven't read about half the books because I have read the other half and they would be on my list too. She says one important characteristic of a comfort read is the amount of tweeness. Too much and it pushes the book over the edge, not enough and it isn't sufficiently comfortable.

Here's her Ultimate List:

• The Pursuit of Love by Nancy Mitford (start there and read them all) 
• Miss Buncle's Book by D.E. Stevenson 
• Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen 
• I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith 
• The Diary of a Provincial Lady by E.M. Delafield
• Persuasion by Jane Austen
• Invitation to the Waltz by Rosamund Lehmann 
• Dusty Answer by Rosamund Lehmann 
• Anything by Georgette Heyer - maybe start with The Grand Sophy
• Excellent Women by Barbara Pym (and everything else she ever wrote) 
• The Dud Avocado by Elaine Dundy 
• Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day by Winifred Watson 
• Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë 
• Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons (also Nightingale Wood by the same author, which I didn't know but am now seeking out) 
• The Cazalet Chronicles by Elizabeth Jane Howard (bliss, plus there are tons of them) 
• The Scotland Street books by Alexander McCall Smith 
• Forever Amber by Kathleen Windsor 
• Ballet Shoes by Noel Streatfeild 
• Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell 
• Travels with my Aunt by Graham Greene 
• Hens Dancing by Raffaella Barker 
• The Tales of the City series by Armistead Maupin 
• What Ho, Jeeves, Code of the Woosters and Uncle Fred in the Springtime by PG Wodehouse (but any, really) 
• The Mapp and Lucia books by EF Benson 
• Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier 
• Frenchman's Creek by Daphne Du Maurier 
• Mariana by Monica Dickens 
• The L-shaped Room by Lynn Reid Banks 
• The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer 
• The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett 
• Little Women by Louisa May Alcott 
• The Towers of Trebizond by Rose Macaulay 
• Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë 
• Angry Housewives Eating Bonbons by Lorna Handvik 
• The Miss Marple books by Agatha Christie 
• Riders and Rivals by Jilly Cooper (also the 'name' books - Bella, Imogen etc) 
• 84 Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff 
• The Jackson Brodie books by Kate Atkinson 
• Heartburn by Nora Ephron
• The Lord Peter Wimsey books by Dorothy L Sayers 
• The Diary of a Nobody by George and Weedon Grossmith 
• The Molesworth books by Geoffrey Willans and Ronald Searle 
• Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert (not sure about including this. Not what you'd call a *cuddly* book)
• A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth 
• The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton 
• Not That Sort of Girl by Mary Wesley 
• Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder 
• The Darling Buds of May books by H.E. Bates (these also work marvellously if you're feeling fat - bonus)